♀Hannah (surname unknown)

Hannah (died before 9 October 1701) was the wife of Samuel Brocklebank, a deacon and militia captain of Rowley, in Essex County, Massachusetts, who died in King Philip’s War^W in April 1676, leaving her a widow with children as young as one and the administratrix of his estate. She was most likely the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Hannah Brocklebank (born 1659).

Marriage and family

Samuel Brocklebank and Hannah were married at Rowley on 18 May 1652; the town’s printed records list the marriage among the entries whose surname is missing, so her maiden name is not known. Between 1653 and 1674 the town recorded the births of their children Samuel, Francis, Hannah, two daughters named Sarah, Jane and Joseph. Two more daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, have no birth entry in the town’s records, but the court named them among the children in 1676. Not all of the children lived: in July 1660 two sons, John and Francis, were buried within three weeks of each other, and the first Sarah died in March 1667, a few months after her birth.

Over those years Samuel rose in the town’s records from lieutenant to captain, and the church recorded him as a deacon. When their last child, Joseph, was born on 28 November 1674, the town entered his parents as “Capt. Samuel and Hanah”.

Widow

A year and a half later the war took her husband. He was killed that April in the Sudbury Fight^W, when Captain Wadsworth’s company was ambushed on its way to relieve the town, and Hannah was left with a household running from a son of twenty-two down to a boy of one.

That September she brought his estate into court. On 26 September 1676 she attested the inventory of his estate in the county court at Ipswich, as “administratrix of the estate of her husband”. It listed the house and homestead with its kiln and barn, a farm towards Bradford, lots of upland and salt marsh, oxen, cows, horses, sheep and hogs, beds, brass and pewter, two guns and a few books, £442 11s in all. The same day the court ordered £80 paid to the eldest son, Samuel, and £40 to each of the six other children, Joseph, Hannah, Elizabeth, Mary, Sarah and Jane, as they came of age or married. The rest of the estate went to the widow, with all the lands bound for the payment of the children’s portions.

She married again. A dictionary of New England’s first settlers published in 1860–62 records that on 4 March 1679 she married Richard Dole of Newbury, a widower with a large family whose first wife had died the previous November; a genealogical history of Maine published in 1909 describes him as a prosperous merchant and landowner there. The same dictionary records that two of Hannah’s daughters married two of Richard Dole’s sons: Mary married William Dole in 1684, and Sarah married Henry Dole in 1686, so that her stepsons became her sons-in-law.

She did not live to see the lands divided. When her children and their husbands agreed on the division on 9 October 1701, the agreement called them the “children of Capt. Samuel Brocklebank and Hanah his wife late of Rowley, deceased”. When and where Hannah died has not been found.

Notes

The marriage, the children’s births and burials, and Samuel’s rank and death are from the printed Vital Records of Rowley, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (1928–31). Rowley then counted its months from March, so the marriage entry “18: 3m: 1652” is 18 May 1652. Two of the children’s entries name their mother: “Hanah (Brocklbank), d. Samuell and Hannah, Mar. 28, 1659”, and Joseph’s in 1674. The Rowley church entered Samuel’s death under 18 April 1676; the accounts written at the time and a granddaughter’s gravestone of 1752 give 21 April, the day of the fight.

The inventory, the court’s order of distribution and the heirs’ agreement of 1701, which the court allowed on 13 October 1702, are printed from the county’s probate files in The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, vol. III (1675–1681), pp. 91–93; the court’s date “26: 7: 1676” is 26 September 1676 by the same count of months. The agreement names her only as the captain’s wife, not under the name Dole.

The dictionary is James Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, and the 1909 history is George Thomas Little’s Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine; neither gives Hannah a maiden name, and her marriage to Richard Dole has not been found in a record. A deed of 1701, printed in Matthew Adams Stickney’s The Stickney Family (1869), has John Stickney and William Dole of Newbury selling, with their wives Hannah and Mary, land that had come to the wives “as part of our wives portion out of Capt. Brocklebank estate”, which agrees with Savage that Mary Brocklebank was William Dole’s wife; William Dole also signed the heirs’ agreement of 1701. In that agreement, however, Sarah signed as Sarah Coffin, and her husband Nathaniel Coffin took a share of the lands; the records read here do not show what became of Henry Dole.